With many concerned that filmmakers may have ditched some of Venom’s most promising content, the British star has now readdressed his previous claims in an interview with IGN.

Well-versed comic book aficionados will no doubt realise that Kasady is the first host of the Carnage symbiote – Venom’s more powerful offspring – and the sequence ends with Kasady himself teasing that when he gets out: “There will be…”

There’s no way to sugarcoat it: Hardly anyone is impressed with Venom.

Join guest host Amy “Symbiote Smasher” Vorpahl, as she runs down a few of the most memorable Venom reactions from social media. Rather, it’s a loud, kind of silly action/buddy cop movie that just wants you to kick back with a bucket of popcorn and have a good time while a space monster licks his chops at you. “It’s noncommittally mediocre and, as a result, forgettable”.

It appears that Venom will go over better with fans of the comics than those who just enjoy superhero flicks. They just opted for a comedic tone, allowing Tom Hardy to improvise wacky scenes like Eddie jumping into a tank of lobsters. Partly, this is due to the fact that, as an origin story, this one seems rote and unimaginative. Is there an R-rated cut sitting there?

Even the PG-13 rating is the safe choice.

The only thing we can be sure of is that, should Venom be greenlit for a part two, Carnage fans will definitely have something to write home about. “Make no mistake: The effects can be dazzling”. It’s reminiscent of the post-“Spider-Man”, pre-MCU superhero pictures, the ones made with some degree of star power and/or production value but lacking a sense of goal beyond showing off a live-action exclamation of a famous comics character.

Hardy says that the idea of symbiosis – needing each other to survive – is built into the characters of Eddie and Venom. “Venom is a bouncy good time”.

“Hardy’s Brock is composed of weird facial tics, squeaky vocal inflections, and hunched body language”. With Tom Hardy given free rein to be as twitchy and slapstick-disastrous as he wants, it’s hard to believe this movie came out in 2018.

But do the end credits of the new Venom movie actually contain a link to the iconic, web-shooting superhero?

Tom Hardy is on peak Tom Hardy form as Eddie Brock, a San Francisco-based investigative journalist who purports to stand up for the little guy, but who turns out to have some extremely questionable sleuthing ethics. I don’t know why his dialect changes from scene to scene, or if he intended the performance to feel slapstick, or if I should be laughing at half the stuff in the movie, but it’s a silver lining to an otherwise unmitigated catastrophe.

But sadly, others didn’t dig what Hardy did with Brock in Venom. You know what I mean? In about three minutes, it packs in more wit, emotion, and thrilling action than in all of Venom, including the existence of multiple Spider-Mans from different universes.

Of course, not everyone felt that the film was an “armless, legless, faceless thing”.

Not all critics were displeased with the film.

“Superhero fatigue got you down?”

Roughly speaking, that’s the same approach Marvel took when it built its B-list cinematic universe: by treating B-listers like A-listers (which is what they eventually became). Spider-Man 3 grossed almost $900 million after opening in May 2007, but reviews were unkind, specifically with regards to the Venom storyline. Katie Walsh of the Tribune News Service called Venom “a mess, but wow, is it ever a fun, fascinating mess”. It may not be gritty, but it’s still a story about Eddie and Venom deciding they’re better off together; a central theme of the comics.